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In my last post I gave my first impressions of the BT eFrame1000 – a wifi equipped digital photo frame, and I hinted that I’d started to investigate how to exploit a feature that’s intended for streaming Flickr photo albums so that I could view information from other sites. So far, I’ve had some success at cajoling the frame into displaying pictures from sites other than Flickr, and showing news and weather updates. Here’s how…

Background

The eFrame 1000 has a feature that can be configured (via the Windows PC software) with URLs for Flickr photo albums. Once configured, you can go to the frame and select Photos > Flickr > [Album Name] to stream the photos in that album directly from Flickr over your wireless network without needing a computer to be switched on. All references to this feature on the frame, the PC software and in the documentation specifically refer to Flickr and Flickr only (I suspect that’s because Yahoo! (who own Flickr) have a partnership with BT who make the frame and the two companies co-brand some of their broadband products). This feature works because each public album/stream/group on flickr has an RSS url that users can subscribe to in order to see the 20 most recent uploads.

Non-Flickr feeds

A flickr RSS feed contains a link to each image (and a smaller thumbnail version). It turns out that although it’s not a documented feature, you can configure the frame to use any RSS feed that’s in the correct format and the frame won’t care that it isn’t coming from flickr.com. Be warned though, you can’t just take a regular RSS news feed, it has to be a feed where every item contains an embedded image in the same format used by Flickr e.g:

<media:content url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3290803901_527112a24e_o.jpg"
type="image/jpeg"
height="1920"
width="2560"/>
<media:thumbnail url="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3483/3290803901_9178782db5_s.jpg"
height="75"
width="75" />

I haven’t yet determined whether the media:thumbnail tag is used.

Frame Channel

The best site so far has been FrameChannel.com. This is a service designed for wifi picture frames whereby a user creates their own channel by subscribing to “widgets”. It’s intended for framechannel specific frames that will make full use of their API to control slideshow speed, transitions, order etc, but they also provide an RSS feed in a format that works with the eFrame. So, if you subscribe to a weather report, you configure the widget on the frame channel website with your location and then the RSS feed for you channel will contain an image that is created by the weather widget to show your local forecast. Similarly the reuters news widget will generate an image in the feed containing a brief headline and associated picture. The RSS feed is a little hidden away so here’s how you find it: Sign in to your framechannel account. Configure your channel. Go to “My Account”. Copy the feed url that appears just below the tab bar into your browsers address bar and load the feed. Then drag the url from your address bar into the flickr feed url box in the eFrame software and click “Update”  – that will download the configuration to your frame. Then in future on your frame you can go to Photos > Flickr  and you’ll see an album named something like “FrameChannel content for…”.

Other sites

I’ve had some success at finding other sites that work with the eFrame. I’ll keep the list below up-to-date as I find others.

Tick/Cross images from FamFamFam Silk library.

Potential Gotchas

I had a few issues with the PC software for the eFrame in that when I tried to load a feed that it didn’t like, it then subsequently failed to accept any other feeds (even valid ones) and just failed silently without any error message. I had to shutdown the sofware (from the system tray) and restart before it would start accepting new feeds again.

This week I bought a digital photo frame. I’ve been tempted to get one of these for a while but been put off until now for a few reasons:

• The “affordable” screens are either very small or very low resolution (or both).
• I run XBMC on my old Xbox so can view every photo I’ve ever taken on the 37″ LCD in the living room anyway.
• Cropping and copying images to a memory card and transferring to the frame seemed like too much hassle.

Frames equipped with WiFi provide a solution to the issue of transferring images to the frame and have been around for a while now but are usually expensive and often tied to a specific photo sharing site or need an ongoing subscription. Enter the BT eFrame 1000 which until recently was £130, but last week I noticed has been reduced to just under £40 (less if you happen to work for said company and get an extra few pounds staff discount, ahem! End of disclaimer). At that price it’s comparable to the run-of-the mill unbranded, low-res screens and I decided was worth a punt. It arrived yesterday and here are my initial thoughts…

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In May this year I enrolled in a photography course at the Open University. I’ve been interested in photography for a while (I’m on my fifth digital camera in not many more years) but it was when I bought a Canon EOS 400d digital SLR a year ago that my interest became more serious. I had a look at the local college and looked into a couple of one or two day courses offered by local photographers but settled on the Open University’s Digital photography: creating and sharing better images (course code: T189) as being the best value and most comprehensive. It’s a ten week course (run twice a year in May and October) and the focus is a roughly 50:50 split between in camera techniques and the so-called “digital darkroom” of image manipulation on the computer. This may not suit everyone as some believe that a photograph should be taken correctly in the first place and any post-processing is “cheating” but it suited me just fine.  The course is worth 10 Open University points (most OU qualifications are multiples of 20 points) but I intended to do the course to improve my photography rather than to work toward a recognised qualification.

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